[Washington Post - 4/8/02] NABLUS, West Bank. At dusk today, for the first time in six days of ferocious combat here, Israeli forces permitted Palestinians to remove their wounded and dead. Ambulances raced to the edge of the Old City, then Palestinian medics made their way on foot in the gloaming through the maze of old streets and debris, finding their way through remnants of a bulldozed building, dangling wires from booby traps and electrical lines, discarded hand grenades and unexploded bombs.
Finally, they came to the al Beik mosque, and to the dead. Ten corpses were laid out in the courtyard, all of them men, some killed days ago. At least 50 people were hurt, the medics said. Some were traumatized, including a young couple who clung to their crying daughter, born last week before Israeli missiles destroyed their home.
"There were 24 bodies in all," said one medic, Tawfiq Gazal. "We dug a hole and buried [the other] 14 of them at a house near here two days ago."
The Israeli army's attack on Nablus last Wednesday caught fighters holed up in the Old City in a vise, and today it tightened nearly shut. After devastating assaults by helicopter gunships carrying missiles and by tanks and snipers, the Palestinian resistance seemed to be crumbling, or melting away, before dawn today.
"There's an eerie silence over the whole neighborhood which I've never heard before," said Raneen Abu Zahra, 22, who lives on the edge of the Old City. "The only thing that breaks the quiet is the sounds of tanks moving."
Tonight the army said it had captured strategic positions in the heart of the Old City but was still facing sporadic gunfire from the twisting streets and narrow covered alleys of the centuries-old market area.
Waving white flags, scores of Palestinian men surrendered, starting this morning and continuing through the afternoon, after Israeli soldiers using loudspeakers ordered them out of their houses -- and in some cases threatened to destroy their homes, residents said.
The Palestinians came trickling out of the Old City either alone or in clumps or five or 15 men, their hands laced behind their heads as they approached the edgy Israeli soldiers. When they got close, they waited in orderly lines to be processed by their identity cards.
"I left my house about five minutes ago," said Abdullah Maslamani, 25, a confectioner who waited with several dozen other Palestinian men to surrender and be screened by Israeli soldiers. "We had to leave our homes and come to them because we didn't know what they might do to us."
Maslamani, clean-cut and neatly dressed, said his apartment in the Old City was raided Sunday by Israeli troops, who blew down a wall and entered without warning. When the explosion occurred, his family had just gone to sleep, vacating the room that Israelis then blasted through. "It's a miracle that we had left that side of the wall before they blew it up," he said.
The troops locked 13 family members in one room and occupied the rest of the apartment before finally leaving at 4:30 a.m. today, he said. This afternoon, Maslamani surrendered after soldiers ordered all men age 19 to 60 to give themselves up.
It was unclear how many of the Palestinians who surrendered were fighters. Many appeared to be pudgy and middle-aged, more likely among the Old City's 20,000 civilian residents than the 200 or so die-hard gunmen whom Israel said it faced in combat over the last few days.
Some who surrendered were released after a few minutes and a cursory check. Others were taken to a nearby school, where troops had established a makeshift screening center. Among the detainees were two married sons of the city's mayor, both in their thirties.
Nablus, a city of 180,000 founded by the Romans and contested for centuries by Muslims, Crusaders, Arabs and Jews, has been the scene of the intense fighting in Israel's 11-day-old offensive, along with the Jenin refugee camp, in the far north of the West Bank.
The toll in Nablus has been high, both in lives and property. The Israeli soldiers blasted down doors and bashed in walls to move from apartment to apartment. Water supplies were damaged and telephone service crashed. Many died, although an exact toll is not known.
In the al Beik mosque tonight, Asmahan Amireh, 23, cradled her 5-day-old daughter, Hala. For the time being, she had nowhere else to go.
Her house was heavily damaged Sunday night by an Israeli missile, she said. And today, soldiers entered the house and "destroyed most of what wasn't destroyed already."
"Then they told us, 'Leave now or we'll kill you,' " she said. "They gave us a half-hour to get out. They took my husband's ID card and they tore it up."
Gazal, the medic in the mosque, said some of the wounded had lingered for days without proper medical care before dying. One contracted gangrene after being shot in the leg; he died four days later, Gazal said. Another was shot in the stomach and died after three days, he said.
Israel insisted that by taking Nablus and seizing control of the Old City, it had furthered the goal of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to destroy the Palestinian "terror infrastructure." Israel said troops had found 13 explosives workshops, one of them quite large, as well as quantities of ammunition, explosives and suicide bomb belts. Soldiers continued to make house-to-house searches tonight, and the occasional thunderous boom of tank fire as well as machine-gun rounds could be heard from parts of the city and a nearby refugee camp.
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[posted 4/9/02]
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